The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which receives no funding in Trump’s budget, has been critical to helping local communities deal with clean water issues such as beach closings.

The Milwaukee County Parks system will hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony July 13 to mark a $3.7 million project aimed at reducing pollution at Bay View’s South Shore Beach. Good for the county, but Monday’s story that the beach was closed seven times in June serves as a stark reminder that completion of the project can’t come too soon.

It also should serve as a reminder of how important clean beaches are on the Great Lakes, and how much damage could be done by the Trump administration’s cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and to projects such as the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. That initiative, which receives no funding in Trump’s budget, has been critical to helping local communities deal with clean water issues such as beach closings. Eliminating the funding is short-sighted and foolish.

“The beach has had seven closures in June, the second-most in a single month since 2003, when the Wisconsin Beach Health organization, operated under the federal Environmental Protection Agency the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, began recording beach closures and warnings,” the Journal Sentinel’s Jordyn Noennig reported Monday.

Noennig also reported that there were five cautionary warnings in June for the beach: “Four warned of elevated bacteria levels and one for heavy rainfall, which tends to drain unsafe water into Lake Michigan.”

The county’s efforts are laudable, directed at the parking lot next to the beach, which sends copious runoff pollution into Lake Michigan and has given the beach a long history of E. coli issues. The project includes creating natural filtration systems, a seawall promenade and rain gardens, all of which are nearly completed, Noennig reported.

And once the Green Infrastructure project is completed, the parks system plans to install a solar-powered disinfection system paid for with a nearly $90,000 grant from the Fund for Lake Michigan. Still, more will be needed.

“The impact of all of these projects won’t change things overnight,” Ian Everett, marketing and communications manager at Milwaukee County Parks, told Noennig.

The park system is working with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences to study what else needs to be done to reduce pollution at South Shore Park. UWM professor Sandra Mclellan told Noennig the parking lot project should be just the start, suggesting that the swimming area be moved about 150 meters south. That’s an idea that deserves serious consideration.

In many cases, though, local governments can’t handle such issues by themselves. Which is why it’s important for Congress to step up and restore funding for the Great Lakes initiative, and do the job that the Trump administration is refusing to do.